Renovating Your Forms: Step 10

Evaluate Your Form

After clients have been using your form for awhile, evaluate the new form to confirm it has solved problems the old form may have caused and to measure productivity gains.

How long you wait to conduct this evaluation will depend on the volume of the form. You may be able to evaluate a high-volume form within a few months. You may need to wait longer if only a few forms are filled out each week or month.

The key to evaluating the success of your form is to collect data before you change the form. You may record such things as how much time staff spend following up with clients to complete or correct information on the form, how many complaints you receive, how many forms are returned incomplete, etc. You may also want to measure or estimate how long it takes clients to fill out your form.

With these benchmarks established, you can re-measure after the new form has been in place for several months, to see if you have successfully reduced paperwork burden.

If the new form has not solved the problems, you may need to make further revisions.